Who is behind Savukku.net (WikiLeaks of India)?

Ever since I've given my Humble Award to Savukku, I've started getting hits about the person behind Savukku website (Julian Assange of Savukku?). In fact, I wasn't aware of the identity of the person behind the Savukku and so I collected the following information.

Name: Shankar
Age: 35
Previous job: Staff of directorate of vigilance and anti-corruption (DVAC). He was suspended and arrested for alleged leaking of taped conversation
Marital status: Single, living with mother (Heleena told me that she read somewhere about this)
Native: Tanjore
Photo: Lifted from blogintamil.blogspot.com shows he's arrested on alleged road rage

Comments

Humble Award - Dr. A.N. Sreevatsan

Dr. A.N. Sreevatsan , ENT specialist located in Adyar, Chennai is one of the gems available in medicines. No assistants in his consulting room and he'd take at least 15mins for every patients. So far I have referred many and all are happy with his approach. Every wannabe doctor should visit him personally to understand his approach. I wish him to be more famous than now. Update (2010-11-21) : Added link to Google Map Keywords : Sreevatsan, Srivatsan, ENT, Adyar, Chennai, Hospital, Doctor

Stampede and the "Dirty" "Dark" Crowd

Actor Ajith Kumar’s recent interview has sparked quite a few conversations on social media. The part that caught my attention, was his take on crowds. About 30 years ago, when I first joined a college in Madurai after growing up in other places, I experienced a few cultural shocks. Perhaps these weren’t unique to Madurai, but that’s where I first noticed them. One major thing that stood out was the behavior of crowds. For instance, if you suddenly see people rushing to board a bus, chances are there’s a pickpocket in action. During one of Madurai's annual festivals, I noticed some young men carrying water bags — not to distribute water, but to spill it on women, often on their chests. Shockingly, this was almost normalized; parents would quietly tolerate it to avoid public embarrassment, walking a little farther behind the crowd. When some women happened to witness this, they would just shoo the boys away instead of confronting them. The crowd, in such cases, became a kind of...

Storing unicode texts in MySQL with phpMyAdmin

Today, I've received a personal mail/request from Sivanantham Hemamalini, working for IT leisure in Singapore. Since I was in company when received the mail, I couldn't answer immediately. If I understand the question right, it is about inputting Unicode texts especially Tamil in phpMyAdmin. PhpMyAdmin 's default characterset is iso-8859-1 and so if we enter anything in the form, browser will convert it into numerical html entities. Say for example, if we enter தமிழ் and submit the form, it will convert it to & #2980;& #2990;& #3007;& #2996;& #3021; . Because of this browser's behavior, it will be difficult to store the Unicode text as it is. Solutions Immediate solution I could think of is changing or forcing the browser's character encoding into utf-8. In Mozilla Firefox, it can be set via View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8) Another elegant solution might be changing the phpMyAdmin configurations so that it send...